Sen. Showy McShowboat, R-Mo., is at it again. Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican junior senator, has long chased national attention with headline-grabbing antics, quixotic legislation and plain old-fashioned demagoguery. Now he says he’ll gum up the works on State Department and Defense nominees unless President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team resigns over the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s a ridiculous demand, and Hawley knows it. But as always with him, the headline is the point.
As this newspaper and others have said, the Afghanistan withdrawal was indeed handled abysmally. But trying to make political bank from that issue by keeping numerous national security positions vacant, hobbling America during globally dangerous times, isn’t a remedy, it’s a campaign tweet.
Hawley last week called for the resignations of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan over the way the Afghanistan withdrawal was conducted. Otherwise, he said, he’ll stall all pending civilian nominations to the Defense and State departments.
“Instead of planning for the worst, they planned for the best,” Hawley glowered during a Senate floor speech. “And now, there must be accountability.”
Underestimating the pitfalls of a daunting military withdrawal is regrettable but, in the real world, is not cause for a purge. If it was, former President Donald Trump’s administration would have been emptied out by its sudden, lurching withdrawal-and-return in Syria, which showed no indication of any planning at all but was apparently driven by nothing but Trump’s impetuousness. Where was Hawley’s glowering then?
More to the point, by stalling these appointments, Hawley threatens to complicate future foreign policy issues like the one he is currently demagoguing. Unlike so much of what comes out of Hawley’s mouth, there is truth in the warning of Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., that Hawley’s game here could “undermine U.S. national security.”
But what does Hawley care? This is the senator who tried to yank health care coverage from vulnerable Missourians with the promise that he had a better plan, which of course never materialized. This is the senator who, despite his Yale law degree, pretends to misunderstand the word “censorship,” so he can file legislation accusing social media companies of “censoring” conservatives by declining to spread their lies.
And this is, of course, the senator who helped facilitate the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by forcing the vote to attempt to overturn the presidential election — and even offered democracy’s attackers a hearty fist-pump.
Hawley’s latest move to sow self-serving chaos into the deadly serious process of filling foreign policy posts is exactly the kind of cynical stunt Missouri and America have come to expect from him. Whenever faced with a choice between constructive statesmanship that could help the nation, or populist pandering that helps only himself, Sen. McShowboat can be counted upon to choose the latter.
